'They lost it and had to start a new life' … political allegories with a cute fluffy tail in Rabbit à la Berlin

The cold war has been examined from many different perspectives. Only now, though, are we getting the rabbit's point of view on the division of Europe in the postwar years. Bartek Konopka's Oscar-nominated documentary Rabbit à la Berlin tells the largely ignored story of the thousands of wild rabbits who thrived in the so-called death zone of the Berlin Wall – the strip of no man's land on the eastern side of the wall.

The dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989/90 may have been a source of great joy for some, but Konopka's film shows its catastrophic effect on the bunny population. "For the rabbits, it was like an exodus. It was very dramatic and terrifying for those animals," the 37-year-old Polish director says. "In the fate of those rabbits, there was some kind of prediction: a bad weather forecast for people."

The rabbits, Konopka says, were "fragile and sensitive" creatures. When they found Berliners trampling all over no man's land, they tried to run away – but weren't always up to it. "For them, it was such a stress. They'd go through one street, look for the nearest bush and stay there. But they were so frightened that they stayed there for many days and died from hunger. It was such a stress that they wouldn't think about what to eat. They'd just stand in one position and die."

Rabbit à la Berlin isn't exactly a natural history documentary. It is intended more as an allegorical study of a totalitarian system. The rabbits are used as a device to burrow into recent east European social history. Just as the rabbits were expelled from their makeshift Eden when the Berlin wall came down, many in the Soviet bloc had to adjust to the strange new post-communist world.

"For people living for 40 or 50 years in the communist system, they had a kind of security. Then they lost it and had to start a new life – our aim was not to judge those people," Konopka says.

Celebrated Polish auteur Andrzej Wajda wrote a letter of recommendation for the film-makers when they were raising finance, and also came to an early screening of the completed project. "After the screening, he said something very interesting. He liked the film and he never expected that the rabbits would be such great actors," Konopka says. With their twitching noses and expressive eyes, the rabbits are indeed screen naturals.

But in truth, the descendants of the Berlin Wall rabbits aren't exactly thriving. Some of the most poignant footage in the film shows them in the city today, desperately trying to cross busy roads and looking quite overwhelmed by the sheer noise and chaos of a big city. Konopka explains that the rabbits now living in the western part of the city were small, evasive and very hard to film, "bitten by dogs, scratched by cats … [a] shadow of the great civilisation from the wall."

When the wall came down, almost all the rabbits migrated west. "It's so funny that nature went the way that people did." Nowadays, there are around 10 colonies of wild rabbits in west Berlin and only one in east Berlin.

"Somehow, they realised, those rabbits, that they will have more peace and better conditions on the western side. That's why they moved there." The director compares them to the east Berliners who headed west, drawn by the dream of luxury and plenty. Many others, though, stayed behind. "There were many people who didn't like to cross and who were afraid because they realised the west might be too shocking for them."

Is Konopka a rabbit-lover? The question provokes a rambling answer about the plight of Poles working in the west. "We always felt ourselves like citizens of the third world. It's in your head. This wall stays in your head. Especially in Germany, you are connected with all those Poles who work illegally and commit crimes – so somehow we identified with those rabbits."

Rabbit à la Berlin screens on 23 March as part of the 8th Polish film festival Kinoteka. Details: www.kinoteka.org.uk